LEAVING THE PANOPTICON
I'm finally leaving Twitter. These viewcounts are the last straw for me.
I joined this platform in 2012 (I was 12), and started really making use of it in about 2018, when I was in university. And, to be honest, I was never the biggest fan of it, but it was where a lot of my friends were, and I was content to tweet away, same as everyone. I found community in Jewish Twitter, trans Twitter, leftist Twitter, and all sorts of other Twitter subcultures. I wanted to do the content creator dance, and everyone seemed to agree: Twitter was an essential part of it. So I took my life, chopped it up into 240-character slices, and poured it out into the vast slurry of tweets.
And it was miserable! I obsessed over these meaningless metrics that were shoved in my face! I constantly checked my phone for push notifications, because I wanted that dopamine hit of "someone liked what I had to say". It made me feel like I constantly had to be funny, or witty - or worse, angry. I had to have a hot take or opinion about everything, the Trending tab throwing all the worst things in the world into my path.
In October, I finally deleted the Twitter app from my phone, limiting my intake to just my computer, and my mental health skyrocketed. I felt SO much better, not having to look for push notifications on my phone... but I still kept compulsively checking Twitter whenever I was on my computer. I was also getting into Cohost and my own website, and it felt like finally surfacing after being underwater - to not have to worry about metrics, and just do what I want, at whatever length I want.
Still, I didn't leave Twitter. I had community here, and I felt like I could strike a balance between Twitter and other, better platforms - after all, it was Important™. If I wanted to succeed on Youtube and Twitch, I had to promote my stuff on Twitter, and it was still a good way of keeping up with my friends.
And then Elon Musk showed up.
The platform is becoming hostile to all those communities I found, and upholding the people who hate us. Still, I stayed, but there was a nagging in the back of my mind, even as the site experience degraded even further. A lot of people jumped ship then, but Hive was suspicious, Mastodon a web of petty interpersonal drama where your posts were dependent on the whims of singular instance admins with no oversight or accountability, and I was already on Cohost and Tumblr. So, I stuck around, even as Musk banned links to other social media sites, dealing a death blow to content creation on Twitter. Twitch and Youtube weren't listed, and I figured I could still hang out with my friends, even as my feed was filled with more and more stress.
But then the view counter appeared on Tweets, and it was the straw that broke the camel's back - the shark-jumping line that tears the immersion and makes you start looking at the mechanisms of the play. I saw a massive Skinner Box feeding on human outrage to drive engagement, gorging itself on our data in an endless panopticon. I'm done tearing myself apart for fake Internet points, especially fake Internet points that tell me I don't measure up.
So, farewell, Twitter. I can't say it's been fun.
To my followers - thank you for interacting with me. I do appreciate you; but I'm a person, and I'm at the end of my rope with this website.
To my friends - I'll see you elsewhere. I have most of your Discords, and several of you are on Cohost or Tumblr, too.
To anyone interested in finding me:
cohost.org/ChaiaEran
twitch.tv/ChaiaEran
youtube.com/ChaiaEran
And, of course,
ChaiaEran.neocities.org
SOLIDARITY FOREVER